The world is spinning at the speed of light | Open
Mary can't sleep.
She wishes she could.
At first, she had. She was so exhausted under the weight of the new world she lives in that she slept like a rock. Now? Sleep evades her, dancing away from her at the last minute when she thinks she's about to drop off. That or there's nightmares.
Some nights, she sits up in her motel room, cleaning guns that are already spotless, shining knives that already gleam. Nights like tonight she tucks the odd few concealed weapons about her person and hauls on a big, oversized jacket (she pretends that it belongs to her husband, but she'd deny that if asked) and she walks.
It's maybe three in the morning. Mary's let her hair lie loose around her face, the opposite of a lazy but tidy ponytail she tucks it into for work, and she's crossing a park. God knows, she's exhausted, she wishes she could just sleep - but it's difficult.
Mary's not made for lumpy single motel beds. She's not made for silence in the night, for keeping guns close by. She is and was born a hunter, but she made herself so much more than that. She's better than all of this, and so are her sons. Mary wants her life back; she wants her stubborn husband in her bed every night, she wants to be woken by her child's cries at four in the morning.
She's happy to have her sons as-is, with all their mistakes made and lives forged without her direct influence. But it's not the same. Mary wants to take them back to Kansas, wants to go home, she wants her normality back.
Still, this is the hand she has been dealt. She can cope with new thinking and technology that she can't quite comprehend. Mary can cope with her grown sons and her husband's other child. She can cope with no husband, no sleep, no real home.Â
That doesn't mean I have to cope well, Mary thinks, sinking onto a bench and closing her eyes.
